My sister’s Iraqi henna party was fabulous. I’m scared my kids won’t have one.
My big sister’s henna party earlier this month was fabulous. Hundreds of relatives danced to Arabic music while an Israeli-Arab singer belted out Iraqi classics. At the night’s peak, my grandmother brought out a bowl of thick brown henna paste (yes, the stuff you use to dye your hair) and aunties and grandmas alike placed balls of it, one by one, onto the couple’s fingers.
Every married member of my family has had a henna party before their wedding. The ritual is meant to send them off to married life with good luck; the verb “to henna” literally means to bless someone.
Henna parties are common throughout the Middle East and South Asia, but the celebration looks wildly different depending on the country you hail from and your family’s customs. My family’s version is Iraqi Jewish, and it has traveled a long way from Baghdad.
My grandparents fled Iraq for Iran in the ‘40s, believing it would offer them a safer future as Jews. Three decades later, after Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979, my family fled once more, this time heading to the U.S. and Israel. And now that we’ve found a home in the States, I worry that this is where we might finally lose the custom. And it isn’t the only one we’re at risk of forgetting.
Like much of Iraqi Jewish culture, henna customs exist primarily inside the heads of my grandmother’s generation. They know how to make t’beet, our version of cholent, a spiced chicken-and-rice dish cooked low and slow for Shabbat that I can never seem to get right. They know how to read your fortune in the bottom of a coffee cup — though, more often than not, the fortune is that you will get married and have lots of babies.
My parents at their henna party Courtesy of the author
They also speak Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic, a dialect that has been spoken by Iraqi Jews for roughly 1,250 years. Today, with only three Jews left in Iraq and only around 6,000 native speakers left in the world, the prospects of the language living beyond my generation aren’t good.
Our traditional henna songs are sung in this dialect, including perhaps the most beloved: Afaki, which roughly means “bravo.” Sung from the perspective of the groom’s mother to congratulate the mother of the bride on making the match, it is laced with sarcasm.
“I raised him. I took all this time to take care of him,” my grandmother explained, paraphrasing the song’s lyrics. “You conned him into marrying your daughter. How you fooled him! You gave him kuba and sweets.” You get the gist.
My family hired an Iraqi-Jewish singer named Ronie Shalom to perform at the henna. He’s the go-to in our community, and as far as he knows, he is the only person in the U.S. who performs Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic songs at weddings and hennas.
A few days before my sister’s celebration, Ronie called my mother to tell her he had injured his leg and would not be able to perform. Her face paled.
Who else could possibly perform this music? Who else would know this music? With 6,000 native speakers on the planet, almost all of them elderly, it seemed impossible there might be another Iraqi-Jewish wedding singer in the tri-state area available on less than a week’s notice.
Enter Samir Shukri, an Israeli-Arab singer from Akko, a port city in northern Israel, who came highly recommended. Samir isn’t Jewish, but his father was a wedding singer in Israel and taught him the classic Iraqi henna songs. These days, Samir says, almost all of his clients are Sephardic Jews. He performs at synagogues and the Chabad in Great Neck, a town home to a large population of Persian and Iraqi Jews.
At my sister’s henna, he roused the crowd, singing familiar songs and accompanying himself on the violin. But without Ronie, the Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic songs went unsung that night. The younger generation couldn’t tell the difference; the older generations wondered if they’d get to poke fun at mom during Afaki.
My grandmother leading the ceremony Photo by Abby Lamdan
Traditionally, a henna party is a women-led operation. In Iraq, women used to play the drums during the ceremony, a custom we seem to have lost here in the States. Female family members who are important to the couple prepare the henna paste — made from crushed leaves — and take turns placing balls of the stuff on the couple’s fingers.
In my imagination, my family’s henna parties in Baghdad looked far more traditional than the ones I’ve attended in the U.S. But according to my great aunts, they wore the latest fashions to their soirees, not the Middle Eastern garb we like to don here.
My grandmother’s generation had European, French-sounding names — Valentine, Angelle, Marcelle. My great-aunt Jaquline remembers wearing a pink lace gown to her henna. My sister, meanwhile, wore an elaborately embroidered Middle Eastern gown that we borrowed from a family friend who had had it made in Morocco. Ironically, the farther we get from Iraq, the more determined we seem to look Iraqi.
I’ve been to more henna parties than I can count, but I never thought to ask why it is that we shove this brown gloop on the bride and groom’s fingers before we send them down the aisle.
I asked my grandma. “It’s our tradition,” she told me matter-of-factly.
“Ok, but why is it the tradition?”
I’ve found that with many of our customs, the logic behind why we do them is mostly because that’s what we’ve been doing for thousands of years. If you ask why, the explanation is often sort of generic. We hit each other on the head with greens and say “santak khdhra” during Passover because it’s said to bring a prosperous year.
I want my kids to have a henna party one day. I want them to grow up like I did – hearing a choir of aunties gossiping in Iraqi-Judeo Arabic over a meal of piping hot kuba hamra. I want their Passover seder to include prayers in Arabic and Hebrew, as is our custom.
With each generation, traditions get lost. We second-generation Iraqi Jews love the food, but don’t always know how to prepare it. We recognize the songs, but have no idea what they mean.
That thought scares me. And a henna is a women-led affair, after all, so I’ll need to get up to speed if I want to keep it alive.
Since I started working at the Forward, I’ve been asking my relatives a lot more questions — an occupational hazard of spending my days writing about Sephardic Jews. Sometimes they have answers. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes their answers contradict each other.
For most of my grandmother’s life, she didn’t have to think about how to preserve Iraqi Jewish culture. She just did Iraqi Jewish culture. My generation doesn’t quite have that luxury. If we want to keep doing these things, first we may have to learn how.
One day, if I’m lucky, I’ll be the auntie mixing the brown gloop at someone else’s henna. And when some annoying grandchild demands to know why we’re putting it on their fingers, maybe I’ll have a detailed answer.
Or maybe I’ll just tell them, “It’s our tradition.”
A little‑remembered Gilded Age millionaire helped make milk safe for American kids through his ‘retail giving’
The 1844 edition of the widely used schoolbook written by William H. McGuffey, “Newly Revised Eclectic Fourth Reader,” includes a dialogue about the difference between “true and false philanthropy”:
Mr. Fantom: I despise a narrow field. O for the reign of universal benevolence! I want to make all mankind good and happy.
Mr. Goodman: Dear me! Sure, that must be a wholesale sort of a job: had you not better try your hand at a town or neighborhood first?
As the discussion continues, the lesson becomes clear. Mr. Fantom’s approach is too ambitious to accomplish much, while Mr. Goodman’s, if narrower in scope, was likely to be more useful in practice.
Nathan Straus made his mark in philanthropy after a successful career running the Macy’s department store. Library of Congress Image by
Many of Straus’ contemporary philanthropists were setting lofty goals for their giving. In oil magnate John D. Rockefeller’s case, it was promoting “the welfare of humanity throughout the world.” For steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, it was “to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.”
Straus pursued more mundane objectives that included championing milk pasteurization. Although his efforts are not as well known today as those of his more ambitious – and wealthier – counterparts, they accomplished a lot and showed that what might be called “retail giving” can have far-reaching effects.
Successful immigration story
The Straus family came to the United States from Germany in the 1850s during the first big wave of Jewish immigration. Lazarus Straus, Nathan’s father, followed a familiar path for Jewish immigrants at the time, beginning as a peddler and eventually establishing his own store in the small town of Talbotton, Georgia, where the members of his family were the only Jews.
He prospered, became a respected citizen and saw that his children received good educations, including in their religion.
Then the Civil War upended the family’s life, first by reviving antisemitic prejudices and then, eventually, by destroying the family’s business.
Starting anew in New York City, Lazarus and his older sons, Isidor and Nathan, began to sell imported china, glassware and other crockery to retailers in the Northeast and South. One was Rowland H. Macy, who had founded an eponymous store that was on the cutting edge of what Fisher calls a “retailing revolution.”
Macy’s innovations included stocking large inventories of many kinds of merchandise, competitive pricing, extensive advertising and providing a variety of services like public restrooms and a cafeteria to make shoppers’ experiences more pleasurable.
Aided by the rapid urban and economic growth of the late 19th century, the model flourished. Department stores displaced smaller, specialty shops. Other retail powerhouses, such as Bloomingdale’s and Lord & Taylor, soon competed with Macy’s.
The Straus family sold their wares at Macy’s. After Rowland H. Macy died, the Straus family became partners with its new owners. By 1896, the Strauses owned the store outright. And Macy’s was expanding: It bought another department store in Brooklyn and created a flagship building on Manhattan’s Herald Square, which Macy’s still occupies.
The landmark Macy’s department store in New York’s Herald Square opened in 1902 while Nathan and Isidor Straus ran the retailer. Library of Congress Image by
His philanthropy journey begins
While Isidor Straus oversaw the store’s internal operations, Nathan focused on the company’s external activities, such as purchasing, marketing and dealing with government and business leaders.
A third brother, Oscar, pursued a career as a politician and diplomat, eventually becoming secretary of commerce and labor under President Theodore Roosevelt and the first Jewish member of a presidential cabinet. Perhaps inevitably, this led to a series of public appointments for Nathan Straus.
However, as they became wealthier, Nathan and his wife, Lina, increasingly devoted their attention to a series of philanthropic projects.
In 1893, the U.S. entered a four-year economic depression, its worst until the 1930s. As unemployment in New York City rose, Nathan Straus used his merchandising skills to address the needs of the jobless and poor.
He created a number of “depots” near tenements and boarding houses that sold coal, food and fuel at discount prices. Fisher, Straus’ biographer, rightly calls these early examples of what is now known as “social entrepreneurship”: the application of business principles to solving social problems.
Making milk less deadly
As these efforts were getting away, Straus also launched what would become his major preoccupation: promoting pasteurized milk.
In New York City in the early 1890s, Fisher writes, “the annual mortality rate among children under five was about 15 percent,” or 18,000 infants and toddlers per year. A main cause was consuming raw milk, which, unless certified by inspectors, was likely not only to contain a variety of pathogens, such as tuberculosis bacteria, but spoil easily going from farm to table.
Although scientists had long known that heating could make milk safer, doctors and public health officials worried that sterilizing milk might also destroy its valuable nutrients.
Straus, who had lost one of his own children to what he believed was a milk-borne infection, built on his projects for the unemployed by working with New York social service agencies to develop pasteurization plants and infant-milk stations near low-income neighborhoods.
They sold sterilized and refrigerated milk at below-wholesale prices, or donated it to those who could not afford to pay. Businesslike efficiency kept costs low, as did donations. Multilingual ads publicized the product’s availability, doctors and nurses advised parents on child-rearing, and careful recordkeeping aimed at assessing the program’s health benefits.
Straus and his wife devoted much of their time and money to this work. In addition to establishing 297 milk stations in 36 cities, they also spoke and wrote widely about the merits of pasteurization.
By 1908, their efforts paid off when the U.S. Public Health Service endorsed pasteurization and state and local governments began requiring that milk sold in their jurisdictions be pasteurized. Raw milk remained available in many states, and debates over its safety continue to this day.
As a result of this and other Progressive Era measures, New York City’s health commissioner estimated that infant deaths dropped by two-thirds
during the first two decades of the 20th century, with similar declines elsewhere in the country.
The coastal Israeli city of Netanya was named after philanthropist Nathan Straus. Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images Image by
Other causes
While most of Nathan Straus’ efforts occurred in the U.S., he used his trips to Europe for Macy’s to promote pasteurization on the continent.
During a 1904 visit, he toured the Mediterranean and stopped in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Impressed by the early Jewish settlements and holy sites he saw, Straus became an ardent advocate for creating a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, an unusual position for a Jewish businessman of that era, according to Fisher.
On a subsequent trip, a broken leg kept Straus from returning to New York on the maiden voyage of the Titanic; his brother Isidor and sister-in-law Ida were not so fortunate.
In the U.S., Nathan Straus led Zionist organizations, while in Palestine, his chief contributions involved supporting a variety of health care and economic development activities, including Hadassah, the women’s health and community development organization founded by Henrietta Szold.
Nathan Straus’ achievements as a philanthropist are not widely known today because he did not create a grantmaking foundation that outlasted him, as Rockefeller and Carnegie did.
Instead, by the time of his death in 1931, Straus had donated much of his fortune. Fisher writes that Straus used to invoke an old Hebrew proverb: “Money given in health is gold. Money given in sickness is silver. Money given after death is lead.”
He also didn’t donate heavily to the burgeoning network of communal organizations set up to assist the growing population of Jewish immigrants, as did the financiers Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg, who were also affluent Jewish immigrants from Germany.
As Fisher notes, this pattern of philanthropy resembles that of Straus’ friend – and pallbearer – Julius Rosenwald, the longtime head of Sears, Roebuck and Co. Both supported Jewish causes as well as major initiatives aimed at helping others: In Rosenwald’s case, it was schools for African American children in the South, while for Straus, it was milk pasteurization in New York City and beyond.
During and after World War I, they worked together to assist Jewish refugees in Europe. Fisher might have added that neither Straus nor Rosenwald sought much recognition for their work.
His thorough account should help give Straus the credit he deserves for his philanthropy. It should also show that donors do not have to aspire to “make all mankind good and happy” to make an important difference.
In many ways, Nathan Straus was an old-fashioned do-gooder, responding to the needs he saw with innovative solutions. As a result, he wound up accomplishing a lot of good.
“Emma,” a young Jewish woman who we met in 2019, didn’t belong to a synagogue. She didn’t have a Jewish partner. She didn’t observe Jewish rituals regularly. On most surveys about religion, she would not seem very engaged with Judaism.
But as Emma talked about what she did in her free time, a very different picture began to emerge. She visited Jewish websites and enjoyed listening to Jewish music. She read books about Jewish topics and had recently attended a retreat for young Jewish adults to learn Torah while also doing yoga.
She was highly invested in learning about Judaism, but she explored her identity without joining traditional institutions.
Most major surveys about religion ask whether someone belongs to a congregation, how often they attend services, whether they pray regularly and whether belief is important in their lives. Those measures help identify broad shifts, like the growing percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated: the “nones.”
But many Americans’ religious lives, like Emma’s, are not disappearing; they are moving away from membership of traditional institutions. To understand what religion looks like in 21st-century America, researchers may need to ask different questions.
Learning through art
As scholars of Judaismand education, we have been exploring how people learn about religion beyond traditional places like synagogues, Jewish schools and summer camps. Between 2019 and early 2023, we spoke with hundreds of people and explored different leisure time activities to discover what people learn about Judaism and Jewishness through cultural arts.
We interviewed dozens of audience members at Jewish-themed shows on Broadway, such as “Leopoldstadt”and “Parade.” We attended Jewish concerts and asked attendees what they learned. We explored how social media communities offer spaces to talk about different Jewish topics, like what fans learned about ultra-Orthodox Judaism from watching the television show “Shtisel.”
‘Shtisel,’ an Israeli series about an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem, ran for three seasons.
Our research revealed that there is a vibrant ecosystem of people learning about religion in their leisure time. Through the arts, both Jews and non-Jews encounter Jewish history, Jewish religious practices and representations of Jewish communities.
Screen and stage
Most people we spoke with told us that they felt meaningful connections to Judaism during activities that would rarely appear on a standard religion survey.
“Joan,” an unmarried woman in her 50s from Connecticut, told us that she was deeply invested in Judaism, but felt that synagogues and Jewish community centers were not welcoming to single people without families. Instead of joining a Jewish institution, she watched Jewish-themed TV shows and movies on Netflix, and joined social media communities to chat with other fans.
“Luis,” who lived in Boston but was born in Argentina, was a Sephardic Jew, a group that traces their ancestry and traditions to Jewish communities who once lived in Spain and Portugal. His wife was Ashkenazi, meaning her ancestors came from Central and Eastern Europe. She considered herself secular, and so the couple joined the Worker’s Circle, a nonreligious Ashkenazi institution rather than a synagogue.
Yet Luis loved deepening his knowledge of Sephardic culture, and he often attended concerts of music in Ladino, a Sephardic language related to Spanish, with other Sephardic immigrants.
American singer Sarah Aroeste writes and performs in Ladino.
For Joan and Luis, these activities were not peripheral to their Jewish lives. Rather, they were central avenues for learning and community. We interviewed hundreds of Jews who told us that cultural experiences were opportunities to reflect on Jewish practices, explore questions of belonging, connect with family histories and find friends with common interests.
New questions
Some aspects of these patterns were distinctive to Judaism. Historically, many Jews have understood Judaism to be a cultural world, and not only a theological tradition. Learning about cultural dimensions of Judaism has long been part of Jewish education.
The broader phenomenon of informal learning, though, extended far beyond a single tradition. Across America, increasing numbers of people learn about religion through media, cultural productions and digital networks. Christians may study biblical themes through podcasts, online discussion groups or religious influencers. Muslims may participate in online learning communities that connect believers across the world.
The challenge for religion researchers, then, is not simply to determine whether engagement with religion is rising or falling. Rather, it is to develop more nuanced ways of understanding how people explore religious themes and practices, beyond traditional institutions. Only then can we more fully understand how contemporary Americans actually live their religious lives.
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